Time heals wounds, and can blur inconvenient facts. A plethora of
anniversary reports in the U.S. media "reminded" the public that it had
been one year since Iraqi President Saddam Hussein expelled U.N. weapons
inspectors, leading to the December 1998 "Desert Fox" bombing campaign
against Iraq.

But Saddam Hussein's oft-invoked expulsion of the arms inspectors never
took place. It was Richard Butler, head of the U.N. weapons inspection
program known as UNSCOM, who voluntarily withdrew the inspectors from
Iraq, giving President Bill Clinton a rationale for launching military
strikes on Iraq.

Butler claimed in a report to the U.N. on December 15 that obstruction
from the Iraqi regime had made it impossible for his inspectors to
effectively carry out their work. But as Barton Gellmann of the
Washington Post (12/16/98) reported, "Clinton administration officials
played a direct role in shaping Butler's text ...at secure facilities in
the U.S. mission to the United Nations."

In fact, Butler's report admitted that "the majority of the inspections
of facilities and sites under the continuing monitoring system were
carried out with Iraq's cooperation," but still concluded that the
"commission is not able to conduct the substantive disarmament work
mandated to it." With this confused explanation, Butler ordered all his
weapons inspectors out of Iraq on December 15, and the next day the
United States began airstrikes. The bombing ended on December 19, the
day the House voted to impeach the president.

But a year later this history seems to have disappeared down a memory
hole.

The Washington Post has misreported these facts--claiming that Iraq
expelled the inspectors--at least four times in 1999, twice in major
news stories (8/30/99, 11/16/99) and twice in opinion pieces by Fred
Hiatt (1/10/99, 7/25/99), who's now the Post's editorial page editor. In
spite of the Post having to print three letters during the year
correcting the record (1/16/99, 9/16/99, 11/25/99), it continues to make
the same mistake.

The New York Times has also repeatedly reported that "Baghdad expelled
the inspectors." (1/8/99; see also 4/16/99, 8/20/99, 10/28/99, 11/18/99,
12/17/99, 2/1/00). The latest time the paper made the error, on February
1, it ran a correction the next day, but none of the other instances
have been corrected. Numerous U.S. papers have made the same error,
including USA Today (12/9/99), the Chicago Tribune (12/18/99), Boston
Globe (10/21/99), Washington Times (11/5/99) and Buffalo News (12/4/99).
 

Television has hardly performed better: When Tim Russert, host of NBC's
Meet the Press (12/19/99) interviewed Democratic rivals Al Gore and Bill
Bradley on foreign policy, he began with this claim: "One year ago
Saddam Hussein threw out all the inspectors who could find his chemical
or nuclear capability--one year." CNN (12/2/99) quoted Butler as
describing how his team had been "thrown out" of Iraq.

Magazines ranging from the scholarly Foreign Affairs (11-12/99) to
Newsweek (8/30/99) made the same erroneous claim. Newsweek added the
wrinkle that "last year ... Moscow, Paris and Beijing virtually allied
with Saddam Hussein to cast U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq." (In
fact, all three had denounced Butler's decision to withdraw the
inspectors--Agence France Presse, 12/16/98.)

Perhaps more than any other source, AP spread the charge that Iraq
expelled the inspectors to news organizations and the public far and
wide. AP reported that "nearly a year [has passed] after President
Saddam Hussein ordered an end to the program," (11/16/99) and referred
to "Saddam Hussein's expulsion of U.N. weapons inspectors." (12/2/99)

This fit of misreportage results from the fact that the actual course of
events does not fit the moral economy of the standard U.S. media
worldview. Saddam Hussein and Iraqis are presumed to be wholly at fault
for tensions with the West; therefore if weapons inspectors left Iraq,
they must have been expelled by Saddam. Facts that do not conform to
these deeply held beliefs simply fade away for many American journalists
and editors.

And, of course, anniversary reports in major American media rarely if
ever recalled the revelations that the U.S. had been using UNSCOM as a
cover for hostile espionage operations aimed at overthrowing the Iraqi
government (New Yorker, 4/5/99)--even though the subsequent history of
UNSCOM's collapse is unintelligible without this crucial fact.

To be sure, many reports have gotten the basic facts right.  AP itself
reported that "the year-long crisis with Iraq began when U.N. weapons
inspectors departed a day before U.S. and British warplanes launched
airstrikes to punish Baghdad for its failure to cooperate fully with
their inspections." (AP Worldstream, 12/18/99) The New York Times has
played it safe by saying that Iraq "thwarted" rather than expelled
UNSCOM (8/15/99). The Minneapolis Star Tribune (11/28/99) correctly
reported that "last December, chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard
Butler withdrew his team on grounds that lack of Iraqi cooperation made
it impossible for UNSCOM to complete its work. The United States and
Britain followed up with a brief bombing campaign."

But with so many different reporters and news outlets getting the facts
completely wrong, independently of one another and in the same fashion,
it is hard to deny that history has to a disturbing extent been
rewritten.
 

Hussein Ibish is the national communications director for the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.